Bihar, Rajasthan have made no progress in digitizing crime records: NCRB data

New Delhi, Jan. 17 -- More than seven years after being approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA), the ambitious Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) project-an attempt to digitize and streamline the entire police process in the country-is far from being completed.
Approved in June 2009, the Centre allocated Rs2,000 crore to connect nearly 14,000 police stations, along with 6,000 higher offices such as police headquarters, finger printing bureaux and state crime record bureaux (SCRB).
The aim was to pre-empt and prevent major crimes-a person with a crime record in any state or district would be on the watch list of all other police departments in the country.
Unevenness marks out policing across states. While one of the most rudimentary steps for making crime records available in the digital domain is the uploading of the First Information Report (FIR), data released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) for 2016 shows that progress made by the police departments of Bihar and Rajasthan stands at 0%. This means that neither of the state polices, according to NCRB, have uploaded the FIRs online. The police department of West Bengal has also been ranked low, with just 24.4% of digitization work being completed so far.
When Mint questioned the West Bengal police's SCRB, it was found that the Inspector General of Police (IGP-SCRB) Anirban Ray was unaware of the issue, and passed the buck on to the Law and Order department, which too, was unaware about the progress of CCTNS.
"We do not deal with this. We only deal with law and order situations. CCTNS is not our domain. This matter rests with the IG of SCRB," said Anuj Sharma, additional director general of police (law and order).
The situation is dramatically different in Jharkhand, where the project is inching towards completion, albeit slowly. Here, the main challenge to the project is the threat from Maoists, who try to prevent on-ground police work.
"Here, we have completed 95% of the work. However, we are facing a major hurdle from remote sites where Internet connectivity is bleak. The other major problem comes from the districts which are Naxal infested. We can only travel to these districts from 11am to 3pm, in plainclothes, mingle with the crowd and do our field work without being noticed by Naxals," said Sunil Bansal, project manager at Telecommunications Consultants India Limited (TCIL), which is handling the CCTNS project in the region.
Yet, beyond the threat from left wing extremists and connectivity problems, is the apathy faced by police stations from constables and on-ground police officers who are disinterested in digitization and continue to rely on the age-old method of manually filing FIRs and recording crimes.
"Although the newer lot of IPS (Indian Police Service) recruits are well trained in technology, there are several officers who shy away from anything that has to do with digitization. There is a general inertia on that front which also tends to slow down work. But digitization is now mandatory and so we have started training all officers in all districts on system integration and the required software," said a senior IPS officer with the Delhi Police, requesting anonymity.
While Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Goa and Kerala have completed digitization, challenges are more prevalent in the north, where, due to the remoteness of some areas, any kind of digitization becomes a challenge. Police departments also pointed to the threat of such sensitive data being hacked into.
"Connectivity and server issues are a huge problem in some states, especially Uttar Pradesh where some areas are remote. Although a major chunk of the work is done, there is a huge threat of hacking and cyber security, for which we are still trying to work out safeguard measures," said Triveni Singh, additional superintendent of Police, Lucknow (special task force, cyber crime).